John Loring, who in 1979 set aside a successful career as a painter and journalist to become the design director of Tiffany & Company, where for the next 30 years he oversaw the creation of every bauble, bangle and bead sold by the storied luxury retailer, in the process becoming one of the country’s great tastemakers, died on June 6 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 86.
His son, Benjamin Havrilak, confirmed the death.
Mr. Loring’s long tenure at Tiffany coincided with a period of dramatic expansion for the company — from a mere seven stores when he arrived to more than 300 when he retired, in 2009.
Under his guidance, Tiffany was part of a seismic shift in American luxury retail, which became less pretentious and more democratic.
“You’d be missing the point of being an American jeweler if you only aimed at the high end and insisted on keeping your nose in the air and being elitist about it,” he told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2002. “This is not an elitist country.”
Mr. Loring was more than a design director, as impressive as that title was. He was also an influential style maven, someone elite society looked toward for guidance on how to dress, host a dinner party or put on a wedding.
He was often compared to famed tastemakers of the past like Baldassare Castiglione and Madame de Pompadour, though he rejected the label.
“The usual thought of an arbiter of taste is a repulsive one,” he told The New Yorker in 1992, “because it leads to sameness in the world, and is killing to the imagination.”
Mr. Loring was a skilled conversationalist who could vault gracefully from the latest gossip to a minute detail about French Rococo furniture. His cultivated air made him a must-have at rarefied gatherings on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris.
“Mr. Loring’s presence at a party is considered nearly as important as New York’s legendary gossip columnists,” The Christian Science Monitor wrote in 1992.
He was only the third design director at Tiffany since Charles Tiffany founded the company in 1837; he followed Louis Comfort Tiffany, the founder’s son, and Van Day Truex, who retired in 1979.
Mr. Loring championed several designers who would become renowned for the work they did for Tiffany, including Paloma Picasso, Pablo Picasso’s daughter, whom Mr. Loring met when she was a teenager and he was a 26-year-old manager of the Yves Saint Laurent boutique in Venice.
He designed several Tiffany products himself, among them the Atlas watch, a best seller inspired by the statue of Atlas holding a clock above the entrance to the company’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Mr. Loring had a degree in English from Yale and had been the New York bureau chief for Architectural Digest in the 1970s, and he continued to write regularly while he was employed by Tiffany, publishing 21 deeply researched books about the company, including “Tiffany Taste” (1986), “Louis Comfort Tiffany at Tiffany & Co.” (2002) and “Tiffany Diamonds” (2005).
Six were edited by his close friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one of his many celebrity mentors and collaborators. “My life has been an absolute miracle of being put in the right hands,” he told The New Yorker.
John Robbins Loring was born on Nov. 23, 1939, in Chicago. His father, Edward Loring, was an insurance executive who had emigrated from Britain. His mother, China (Robbins) Loring, was part of the city’s high society, an avocation that left a mark on young John.
When he was 5, the family moved to Cave Creek, Ariz., today a far northern suburb of Phoenix but at the time an isolated farm community. His father had retired from insurance and eventually ran a guest ranch. John walked barefoot to attend school in a one-room building.
The family took extended trips to Palm Beach. One day, his nanny took him to Miami Beach, where, through an acquaintance, she introduced him to a frail Al Capone.
“He was a little disappointing,” Mr. Loring told Architectural Digest in 2004. “He struck me as a perfectly nice old man.”
His parents sent him to high school on Long Island, and he enrolled at Yale at 16. After graduating in 1960, he immediately left for Paris.
His goal was to bone up on European languages and art before starting the doctoral program in art history at Yale. Instead, he fell in with the city’s artistic community and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, intending to become a painter.
Even then, young and penniless, he had a singular ability to surround himself with the rich and famous. He was commissioned to paint a portrait of Yves Saint Laurent; when it was done, Mr. Saint Laurent hired him to run his shop at the Hotel Cipriani in Venice.
In 1970, Mr. Loring moved to New York, where he lived and worked in a studio in SoHo and began building a reputation as an artist. Among his major commissions was a large mural for the U.S. Custom House in the recently completed World Trade Center complex.
He also wrote extensively on art and design, and eventually joined the staff at Architectural Digest.
A chance encounter at a dinner party with the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert — she noticed his red Converse sneakers — led to an introduction to Walter Hoving, the chairman of Tiffany, who was looking for a design director.
The same year that Mr. Loring began working there, Tiffany was bought by Avon, the cosmetics company. It was a marriage of inconvenience, and the huge, mass-market Avon struggled to popularize its high-society acquisition. Five years later, a group of investors bought Tiffany from Avon. (In 2021, it was sold to LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate.)
Mr. Loring never married. His adopted son, Mr. Havrilak, is his only immediate survivor.
After retiring, Mr. Loring continued to work for Tiffany as design director emeritus, and also worked extensively with Tivoli Gardens, a historic amusement park in Copenhagen.
Despite decades spent cultivating an unerring sense of style and grace, he insisted that such qualities were innate from birth.
“It gets corrupted, usually sooner rather than later, by family mythology, environment, religion, politics, nostalgia — you name it,” he told The New Yorker. “What I would call bad taste is the perversions of taste which people acquire. Bad taste is received opinion.”
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